Wiping the nozzle face of a printhead is an effective way of removing paper dust, ink floods, dried ink or other contaminants. However, pagewidth printheads are difficult wipe. While pagewidth printers with nozzle face wipers exist, the wiping mechanism is relatively slow and or complicated. Currently available pagewidth printheads have several printhead integrated circuits spaced apart from the cover in the media feed direction. It is impractical for a single wiper to clean all the printhead integrated circuits, so each printhead integrated circuit is wiped individually. Furthermore the wipers move transverse to the media feed direction. This is to avoid colour mixing between the nozzles of different colour but rows of nozzles for each colour extend across the printhead ICs in a direction transverse to the media feed direction. Wiping along the rows of nozzles minimises the risk of contaminating ink in one nozzle with ink of the different colour. However, as the printhead ICs are elongate and extend transverse to the feed direction, the wiper must travel the entire length to clean all the nozzles. In light of this, the mechanism that actuates the separate wipers for each printhead is complex, occupying a relatively large space and consuming a significant amount of time during each maintenance cycle.
Another problem associated with wiping pagewidth printheads is the control of the contact force between the wiper and the nozzle face. Wiping large sections of the nozzle face with every traverse reduces the time required to wipe the entire printhead. However, a long wiping surface must be maintained parallel to the nozzle face as it moves across the printhead in order to keep the contact force uniform. It will be appreciated that a non-uniform wiping force can damage the delicate nozzle structures wherever is two strong and fail to properly clean the nozzle face wherever it is too weak. It is possible to manufacture a printhead maintenance facility with a chassis that precisely supports the soft maintenance stations structures (wiper blades, the capping seals and the like). However, manufacturing a chassis structure with such fine tolerances typically requires the chassis to be a metal fabrication involving precision machining. Such precision engineering is counter to low-cost, high-volume production techniques which help to reduce the unit cost of each printer.